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1 FROM THE WILL THEORY TO THE PRINCIPLE OF PRIVATE AUTONOMY: LON FULLER S CONSIDERATION AND FORM Duncan Kennedy* Lon Fuller s Consideration and Form originated a scheme for the analysis of contract questions based on multiple formal and substantive considerations, with the principle of private autonomy first among equals. This Article places Fuller s scheme in the context of the critique of the nineteenth-century will theory of contracts and the rise of sociological jurisprudence and legal realism. Fuller built on European legal theory and on civilian contract law solutions that seemed more flexible than those provided by the objective theory of contract formation and consideration doctrine. Fuller s scheme came closer to modern policy analysis than anything in the prior literature. It nonetheless achieved only a partial synthesis, denying any place to what the writers of the time called the social dimension of the field and underplaying conflict among the factors he identified. These traits may be explained by the fact that he was breaking new ground and by the center-right ideological agenda he was pursuing within private law theory. INTRODUCTION In this Article, I read Lon Fuller s Consideration and Form 1 as an incident in the emergence of what I will call the conflicting considerations model of legal reasoning. I restrict myself to a single area within this large frame: the development of American contract theory from the publication of Holmes s The Common Law in 1880 up to the publication of Fuller s article in This will be a study of the writings of legal academics, rather than of case law, of what the Europeans call doctrine. It will be a major theme that, during this period, American contract theory was continuously responsive to the challenges posed by European legal philosophy and by civilian contract theory, so that what I will be describing is a truly international development. In brief, my thesis is that the current understanding of American legal academics is that each and every one of the valid legal norms that makes up our legal system (including private, public, and international law) can be understood as the product of what I will call conflicting considerations. Every rule can be understood as representing a choice in the colloquial lawyers sense of a policy question. We resolve such questions by balancing conflicting considerations, and throughout this paper I will categorize these as formal, substantive, and institutional. * Carter Professor of General Jurisprudence, Harvard Law School. Thanks to Marietta Auer, Andrea Barenghi, David Barron, Scott Brewer, Christine Desan, David Kennedy, Roy Kreitner, and Todd Rakoff. Errors are mine alone. 1 Lon L. Fuller, Consideration and Form, 41 COLUM. L. REV. 799 (1941). 94

2 2000] FULLER S CONSIDERATION AND FORM 95 Formal considerations have to do with the choice between rules and standards of greater or less generality, arranged in rule/exception or rule/counter-rule configurations. Substantive considerations include conflicting utilitarian or welfarist considerations, conflicting moral principles, and conflicting rights implicated in the decision. Conflicting legal institutional considerations arise from the fact that we address the choice of a legal norm in the context of the separation of powers, federalism, the division of sovereign power among nation states and international organizations, and so forth. 2 At present in the U.S., I think we all agree that the conflicting considerations that are invoked in public, private, and international law disputes are analogous. There is a single underlying model of policy conflict with which we can easily contrast a model of legal necessity, or deduction, or law, or straight doctrine. There is an equally clear contrast with what I will call a reconstruction project, in which a legal theorist uses preferences, rights, moral philosophy, or democratic theory to develop right answers dictated from an outside normative system. 3 I will refer to all of these modes of arguing formal, substantive, and institutional as involving conflicting considerations, rather than using the word policy, for two reasons. First, the consciousness I want to describe is a particular development of the widespread sense of elite legal academics in the first half of the twentieth century that they should replace something they loosely called deduction with something they loosely called policy analysis. The particular form of analysis that triumphed was the conflicting considerations type, rather than the initially far more popular type in which a (single) policy requires a rule, much as deduction can require a rule, except in the mode of social rather than logical necessity. Second, it seems a good idea to try to avoid confusion 2 I develop this typology at greater length in Duncan Kennedy, A Semiotics of Legal Argument, 42 SYRACUSE L. REV. 75, (1991) [hereinafter Kennedy, A Semiotics of Legal Argument]. See also DUNCAN KENNEDY, A CRITIQUE OF ADJUDICATION 393 n.6 (1997) [hereinafter KENNEDY, A CRITIQUE OF ADJUDICATION] (citing various typologies); J.M. Balkin, The Crystalline Structure of Legal Thought, 39 RUTGERS L. REV. 1, (1986) (offering a typology of legal arguments). 3 The consensus appears when comparing the starting points of reconstruction of today s authors. For example, compare RONALD DWORKIN, LAW S EMPIRE (1986) (describing the pragmatist ), and RICHARD A. POSNER, THE PROBLEMS OF JURISPRUDENCE (1990) (discussing practical reason ), with ROBERTO M. UNGER, WHAT SHOULD LEGAL ANALYSIS BECOME? (1996) (describing pessimistic progressive reformism ). For descriptions of the general consciousness I am describing, see MELVIN A. EISENBERG, THE NATURE OF THE COMMON LAW (1988) (describing moral norms and policy goals influencing common law); MORTON J. HORWITZ, THE TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICAN LAW, : THE CRISIS OF LEGAL ORTHODOXY (1992) (summarizing and critiquing developments in legal thought since 1960); ROBERT S. SUMMERS, INSTRUMENTALISM AND AMERICAN LEGAL THEORY (1982) (offering overview of pragmatic instrumentalist theories).

3 96 COLUMBIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 100:94 with the more restrictive use of the word policy to refer to the utilitarian subset of considerations. 4 The genealogical question that interests me is how we got to what I am claiming is the nearly universal elite legal academic view that we could indeed resolve all situations where there is a choice of norm by balancing conflicting considerations of one kind or another. Of course, there is a lot of conflict about whether we should balance in cases where we clearly could if we wanted to, about how often we have a choice, and even more about how we should go about balancing and what we should balance when that procedure seems appropriate. As to the significance of balancing for the rule of law, adjudication, or liberal or radical political theory, there isn t even agreement about how to conceptualize the disagreement. For private law, I will argue, the most important respect in which the situation in 1900 differs from that in 2000 is that, in spite of their complete disagreement about the sources and ends of law, the rival schools of nineteenth century legal theory were in agreement that there was a single primary basis of legal liability. As Pound argued persuasively in 1917, the main schools of legal theory, including natural rights (Lockean in the U.S.), metaphysical moralism (Kant), idealism (Hegel), historicism in the mode of Henry Maine (status to contract), social Darwinism, and utilitarianism, were in agreement about the crucial characteristics of modern law. The state ought to and largely did in fact define the rules of law so as to guarantee the free exercise of individual will, subject to the constraint that willing actors respect the like rights of other willing actors. 5 This agreement existed whether or not one was a positivist in legal theory. In other words, even if you believed that the only coherent definition of law derived it from the will of the sovereign, you were overwhelmingly likely to believe that the end of the sovereign s commands should be the liberation of the individual will, subject only to the constraints necessary for everyone to have equal freedom. This Article is devoted to showing how this understanding of contract theory came apart, and was replaced by the conflicting considerations approach. I distinguish between external and internal critiques, and between critiques that used the analysis of formal considerations considerations of administrability in undermining the will theory, and critiques that demonstrated the presence of other substantive policies than will within the contract core. I will have practically nothing to say here about the emergence of conflicting institutional considerations as a recognized sub-category within private law theory. 4 See, e.g., RONALD DWORKIN, TAKING RIGHTS SERIOUSLY 22, 90 (1978). 5 See Roscoe Pound, The End of Law as Developed in Juristic Thought II: The Nineteenth Century, 30 HARV. L. REV. 201, 202, (1917); see also Morris Cohen, The Basis of Contract, 46 HARV. L. REV. 553, , (1933) (describing will theory of contract); Max Radin, Contract Obligation and the Human Will, 43 COLUM. L. REV. 575, (1943) (discussing centrality of will in nineteenth-century legal thought).

4 2000] FULLER S CONSIDERATION AND FORM 97 Fuller s contribution in Consideration and Form was to the long-term project of moving from the will theory of contractual liability to our conflicting considerations model, by arguing persuasively that, even after the demise of the will theory, a principle of private autonomy was and should be the key consideration in private law theory, to be harmonized with, and occasionally balanced against, a small number of counter-principles. 6 His article superseded in a decisive way two earlier approaches to the critique of the will theory, which were either to refute it absolutely, or to subordinate it as a mere means to a higher goal, for example, the social, or the relational, and then restrict its scope, say, by excluding labor law from its ambit. The first approach annihilated the will theory, while the second left it intact within its restricted domain. Fuller, by contrast, reduced it to the status of first among equals, even within the private law core. I don t want to claim that these were firsts in the sense that they had never occurred to anyone before. I do want to claim that the article is the first to manage to stand for these propositions. In the genealogy of the conflicting considerations model, this, rather than factual priority, is what makes an article important. Consideration and Form was, however, no more than a kind of mid-point in the development of the conflicting considerations model. The reason for this is that Fuller achieved a coherent formulation of the new approach, as applied to private law, in part through the device of choosing conflicting considerations that were arguably nonideological. In order to understand our situation at the end of the century, it would be necessary to take the story forward from Fuller s article, through the process by which the potentially threatening traces of the political that Fuller purged from his version of the core found their way back into it. In this process, the key actors after the Second World War were Friedrich Kessler, Stewart Macaulay, and Ian Macneil. And then we would have to take up the stage that begins around At that point, contract theorists moved from setting up the conflicting considerations model to trying to supersede it, either with one or another new normatively cogent integrating model (e.g., rights, law and economics, democracy, republicanism, equality, personhood), or with one kind or another of meta-theory of the conflicting considerations model itself (e.g., critical legal studies). I don t think the common understanding of the role of policy in legal reasoning has changed much as legal theorists have pursued these projects. Before I begin, I should indicate, although I will not pursue, the partisan orientation behind this work. One of the many themes of critical legal studies over the last 25 years has been the notion that there is such a thing as American legal consciousness, and that it has a history we can trace. Of course, if it exists it has many possible histories. The one that 6 Fuller, supra note 1, at 806.

5 98 COLUMBIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 100:94 I ve worked to construct has been a Death of Reason narrative (a grand recit of grands recits), in which legal consciousness participates in an even more general or abstract history of American thought that in turn participates in a Western story of loss of faith. It is important that loss of faith is something that happens as an event along a rationalizing work path that transforms whatever discourse we are talking about, so that we lose faith (or don t) in reason in a world that has been transformed by reason, rationalized to the point of arbitrariness, so to speak. This is a familiar Western account; among its various bards perhaps my favorite is Horkheimer, who published his most notable version, The End of Reason, in 1941, the year that Lon Fuller published Consideration and Form in this law review. The era of reason is the title claimed by the enlightened world. The philosophy this world produced is essentially rationalistic, but time and again, in following out its own principles, it turns against itself and takes the form of skepticism. The dogmatic or the skeptical nuance, depending on which was given the emphasis, in each case determined the relation of philosophy to social forces, and in the shifting fortunes of the ensuing struggle, the changing significance of rationality itself became manifest. The concept of reason from the very beginning included the concept of critique. Rationalism itself had established the criteria of rigidity, clarity and distinctness as the criteria of rational cognition. Skeptical and empirical doctrines opposed rationalism with these selfsame standards. The left-wing Socratic opposition branded Plato s academy a breeding place of superstition, until the latter moved toward skepticism. Skepticism purged the idea of reason of so much of its content that today scarcely anything is left of it. Reason, in destroying conceptual fetishes, eventually destroyed itself.... None of the categories of rationalism has survived... Since this opinion has pervaded every stratum of our society, it does not suffice to propagate freedom, the dignity of man or even truth. Any attempts along this line only raise the suspicion that the true reasons behind them are either held back or are entirely lacking. 7 This passage reflects the darkness of the year 1941, a darkness of which the reader will find no trace in Consideration and Form. Horkheimer and Fuller seem to be characters from different worlds. For the one, the meaning of the moment, suffused in the pain and death inflicted on innocent real bodies in the camps and battlefields of Germany and Russia, is that the progress of reason that leads to its self-destruction has come to an end; there is nothing left but barbarism or free- 7 MAX HORKHEIMER, The End of Reason, in THE ESSENTIAL FRANKFURT SCHOOL READER 26, (Andrew Arato & Eike Gebhardt eds., 1978).

6 2000] FULLER S CONSIDERATION AND FORM 99 dom. 8 For the other, the point is that it would.., be unwise, and in a broad sense even impossible to abolish the doctrine of consideration. 9 And yet Fuller s resuscitation of the will theory of contracts, which he himself had helped slay a few years earlier, seems in retrospect hard to understand without the background represented by Horkheimer. I mean that Fuller s article is part of the reaction of the liberal intelligentsia against the rise of Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism. Moreover, its politics, I will argue, represent a strand within the reaction, that of the center-right. There is a second connection. In my mind, the history of American contract theory presents a paradigmatic case of reason unraveling itself, with [t]he dogmatic or the skeptical nuance, depending on which was given the emphasis, in each case determin[ing] the relation of philosophy to social forces. 10 Since around 1970, the question has been what to do with the yarn. But the question is too close to us to permit even an attempt at an answer in the philosophy of history mode in which this essay is written. 11 Part I summarizes Consideration and Form, introduces the conflicting considerations model, and briefly traces some elements of its history in general legal theory. Part II describes the external critique of the will theory according to which we should subordinate it to higher values, then restrict it to the sphere in which it will operate to achieve those values. Part III takes up two different internal critiques of the will theory. One argues that contract law is more than will, because reasons of administrability constantly lead us to disregard will. The second argues that even if we restrict will to an appropriate sphere, according to higher motives of ethics and utility, there will be substantive considerations other than protecting will at play in deciding on contract rules. Here I explore the historical origins of Fuller s triad of private autonomy, reliance protection, and prevention of unjust enrichment, as the substantive bases of contract enforcement. In Part IV, I argue that Fuller s particular contribution came with a centerright ideological subtext, namely the expulsion of the social from the doctrinal core of contract law. The path of development of the conflicting considerations model in contract theory involved the reintegration of this element, understood as threateningly ideological, into that core. Throughout, I argue that Consideration and Form deserves its fame not because it contributes to our understanding of legal form or the doctrine of consideration, but because it moved several important incremental steps forward along the path to our present conflicting considerations consciousness, steps that had been very fully prepared by (acknowledged) previous steps. 8 Id. at Fuller, supra note 1, at Horkheimer, supra note 7, at My model in this Article has been Catherine Colliot-Théléne, LE DÉSENCHANTEMENT DE L ÉTAT DE HEGEL Á MAX WEBER (1992) (discussing the disenchantment of the state from Hegel to Max Weber).

7 100 COLUMBIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 100:94 I. CONFLICTING CONSIDERATIONS IN LEGAL THEORY A. Consideration and Form as Conflicting Considerations Analysis I first read Fuller s article in 1972, at the suggestion of a senior colleague, John Dawson, while I was an assistant professor teaching contracts. It profoundly influenced my first law review article, called Legal Formality, 12 which I was writing at the time, and then, to a lesser degree, my second, Form and Substance in Private Law Adjudication. 13 I thought it made sense of consideration doctrine, with which neither my student experience, using the Fuller and Braucher casebook, 14 nor my first teaching effort, using Ian Macneil s radically anti-formalist casebook, 15 had seemed to help. Much more important was that the article was a striking contribution to the general legal theoretical topic of the form of legal directives. It was particularly helpful to understanding the way formal considerations come into play when we are dealing with formalities rather than with just any old rule of law. In order to understand the fascination of this, I think it is important to see just how consideration doctrine looked to a recent law school graduate back then. Consideration was a requirement for the enforcement of a promise, well established by precedent in all American jurisdictions. It had a precise definition: a legal detriment to the promisee, bargained for or given in exchange for that promise. The logical manipulation of the definition appeared to resolve a number of quite concrete, sometimes practically significant, and sometimes ethically controversial questions. The most familiar of these were: 1. Should courts enforce promises in situations of half-completed exchange (unilateral or bilateral)? yes, there was consideration. 2. Should courts enforce the promises in an executory bilateral contract situation? yes, there was consideration, though it was possible to argue that finding it involved circular reasoning. 3. Should courts enforce promises to make gifts? no, no consideration (except sometimes promissory estoppel would substitute). 4. Should courts enforce promises to compensate for previously conferred benefits (moral consideration)? no, no consideration. 5. Should courts enforce modifications of contracts unilaterally beneficial to one party at the expense of the other (pre-existing duty rule)? no, no consideration (except where there was novation). 6. Should courts enforce firm offers or offers in unilateral contract situations, as in the famous flagpole hypothetical? no, no consideration (except possibly in case of reliance). 7. Should courts enforce a gratuitous promise of guarantee of another s debt? no, no consideration. 8. Should courts enforce gratuitous 12 Duncan Kennedy, Legal Formality, 2 J. LEGAL STUD. 351 (1973). 13 Duncan Kennedy, Form and Substance in Private Law Adjudication, 89 HARV. L. REV (1976) (hereinafter Kennedy, Form and Substance]. 14 LON L. FULLER & ROBERT BRAUCHER, BASIC CONTRACT LAW (2d ed. 1964). 15 IAN R. MACNEIL, CASES AND MATERIALS ON CONTRACTS: EXCHANGE TRANSACTIONS AND RELATIONSHIPS (1971).

8 2000] FULLER S CONSIDERATION AND FORM 101 promises not to sue on acknowledged debts (Foakes v. Beer 16 )? no, no consideration, unless it was possible to construe the release as an executed gift of personalty. 17 No one was a formalist in Legal rules established through precedent and then worked out by deduction were (and still are) everywhere, but we were (and still are) more interested in whether they were good rules or bad rules. To reach an opinion on that, one needed to know what they were about why one might have wanted to adopt them in the first place and then keep them in effect rather than overruling them or modifying them by statute. Since all the eight results listed in the last paragraph at least arguably followed deductively from the definition, it seemed at least possible that there was some general principle, objective, or function motivating the adoption of the definition. This would make the doctrine intelligible, even if it remained controversial. Working out the implications of the definition in one situation after another would be a way to put the principle into effect, to secure the objective, or to perform the function. On the other hand, I was familiar with another kind of approach to legal rules, that is, a full fledged policy analysis (though I can t at the moment remember what I would have proposed as a good example of this genre. Very possibly it would have been Fuller s article with Perdue, The Reliance Interest in Contract Damages 18 ). That was what Fuller s article turned out to be, much to my delight. Rather than proposing a single rationale of consideration, Fuller disintegrated or dissolved the classic doctrinal category. Amazingly enough, he didn t even trouble to state the classical definition, let alone address the question whether it is a rule that courts are obliged to follow, through its various deductive permutations, under stare decisis. He therefore had no occasion to reflect on the question whether the eight sub-rules are logical implications of the doctrine he takes for granted that they are presently in force. Each has distinct pros and cons from the point of view of his situationally fluctuating set of formal and substantive policies. Without even a nod to legal necessity, Fuller proceeds to figure out for each typical situation whether its sub-rule, viewed on its own according to its specific effects, achieves the congeries of policies that the definition has been pushing us toward all along L.R 9 A.C. 605 (H.L. 1884). This way of looking at it is alive and well. See, e.g., JOHN D. CALAMARI & JOSEPH M. PERILLO, CONTRACTS, ch.2 (West Group Black Letter Series, 3d ed. 1999). 18 Lon L. Fuller & William R Perdue, Jr., The Reliance Interest in Contract Damages: 1, 46 YALE L.J. 52 (1936) [hereinafter Fuller & Perdue, Reliance Interest I]; Lon L. Fuller & William R. Perdue, Jr., The Reliance Interest in Contract Damages: 2, 46 YALE L.J. 373 (1937) [hereinafter Fuller & Perdue, Reliance Interest II]. 19 See Fuller, supra note 1, at

9 102 COLUMBIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 100:94 Fuller showed that the requirement of consideration was indeed a form as much as a seal, 20 as Holmes had written in The Common Law, but that, contrary to Holmes s suggestion, it was more than that. To call it a form was to say that, within some limits, it imposed no substantive requirements on what promises parties could make legally enforceable. Rather, it required that to make any promise enforceable, it was necessary to use the form of recital and then actual handing over of some consideration to indicate that you really wanted to be bound. If it was a form, it was because there was no requirement of adequacy of consideration no requirement of equivalence in the purported exchange of something for the now enforceable promise. If there was no requirement of adequacy, then you could make a gift, or any other unilaterally onerous promise, binding simply by reciting, and then actually handing over some token item, such as a peppercorn, to clearly signal your intent to make the promise legally binding, and the court would oblige. But if it was a form, that also meant that if you failed to use it, you suffered the sanction of nullity, no matter how clear it might be what your intentions were. The reasons for imposing this kind of formal requirement, according to Fuller, were three: (1) to provide good evidence of the parties agreement, (2) to make sure that they thought carefully before making the kind of promise in question, and (3) to make sure that they understood and could organize their behavior around a very clear distinction between legally enforceable and unenforceable promises. This last reason, the channeling function, turns out to be much more complicated in Fuller s treatment, as we will see below, than this summary indicates. 21 Holmes may have wanted consideration to be a form as much as a seal, but this seemed a bizarre interpretation given that there was all kind of authority imputing a substantive objective, namely the exclusion of promises to make gifts, and other unilaterally onerous promises, from legal enforcement. The ground of non-enforcement was not inadequate formality, but rather that there were good reasons not to enforce them, no matter how carefully formalized and no matter how clear it was that the promisor intended them to be enforceable. Moreover, in spite of the ostensible lack of an adequacy requirement, there seemed to be many cases that manipulated or disregarded the definition in order to impose a de facto adequacy requirement, for example in the case of the widow whose promise to pay off her husband s worthless note was held unenforceable. 22 Fuller argues that these substantive results should be defended or criticized not in terms of the functions of legal formalities, but in terms of the substantive objectives we pursue when we give remedies OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, THE COMMON LAW 273 (Boston, Little, Brown, and Co. 1881). See Fuller, supra note 1, at See Newman & Snell s State Bank v. Hunter, 243 Mich. 331, 220 N.W. 665 (Mich. 1928).

10 2000] FULLER S CONSIDERATION AND FORM 103 for breach of promises. These are (1) to secure private autonomy, (2) to protect reliance, and (3) to prevent unjust enrichment. 23 According to Fuller, consideration was a doctrine that served different purposes. It was indeed a form (like the seal, the requirement of an acceptance to make a contract, the parol evidence rule, or the statute of frauds) and could be assessed as a form in terms of the functions of formalities. But it was also a substantive restriction on freedom of contract, justified by the functional reasons for refusing to enforce particular kinds of promises. It was therefore possible and indeed urgent to assess the application of consideration doctrine in terms of all six considerations, three formal and three substantive, that were bases of contractual liability, meaning that they underlay all contract rules, not just consideration doctrine. 24 Overall, consideration doctrine served its formal and substantive purposes to different degrees in different situations to which it was applied. In some of these situations, it served its underlying purposes well, and in others ill. Occasional judicial resistance to applying the definition, which produced doctrinal inconsistency, was plausibly explained by the failure of the doctrine to adequately further the underlying formal and substantive bases of contract liability in the subset of cases in question. 25 In light of this analysis, on the one hand, quite a bit of law reform seemed a good idea. On the other hand, even if we abolished the requirement of consideration, we would still have to find some functionally equivalent means to accomplish its formal and substantive objectives. 26 Viewing consideration doctrine as a formality, we ask the extent to which, in any given situation, it promotes the evidentiary, cautionary, and channeling functions Fuller peremptorily assigns to formalities. Viewing the doctrine as a restriction on freedom of contract, we ask whether the restriction confines enforcement appropriately, given the goals of securing private autonomy, compensating reliance, and preventing unjust enrichment. A striking move in the article is to ask (with respect to consideration viewed as a formality) to what extent the nature of the situation allows accurate fact-finding ex post, cautions people ex ante, and clearly distinguishes the moment when we pass from merely moral to legally binding obligation. 27 Fuller concludes that some of the sub-rules listed above invalidate promises for lack of consideration when the nature of the situation gives assurance of the adequate performance of cautionary, evidentiary, and channeling functions. In other words, we could enforce written promises of guaranty in business contexts, even if unilaterally favorable to one party. In these contexts, there is no apparent substantive or formal See Fuller, supra note 1, at See id. at 800. See e.g., id. at 821. See id. at 824. See id. at

11 104 COLUMBIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 100:94 justification for refusing to let parties bind themselves unilaterally. 28 In short, each of the sub-rules that the black letter law made flow from the definition of consideration could be and should be treated as a separate rule in its own right, to be justified, modified, or rejected by a de novo application of a unified formal and substantive policy analysis applicable to all questions of contract law. Reading the article in 1999, my then self seems, to my present self, to have misread it in several different ways. First, I attributed to Fuller insights that were not his but those of the lineage in which he was working (he very fully identifies these sources, but doesn t go to the trouble of separating out what part of the article is original and what part is representing and clarifying or obscuring their ideas). 29 Second, the article doesn t seem as powerful as an example of policy analysis as it seemed to me then. Indeed, I can see that I read quite a lot into it that wasn t there. Third, it didn t occur to me that Fuller was doing something highly original in proposing a principle of private autonomy as one of the concurring/competing policies within the contract core. That seemed an obvious rather than an original move. My misreading was no accident. As a typical member of the early 1970s legal academic elite, I was moving in the direction of the self-conscious formulation of what I am calling the conflicting consideration model. 30 I read Fuller s article as though it were a text of which this was the hidden meaning. B. The Conflicting Considerations Model versus Classical Legal Thought 1. The Conflicting Considerations Model. a. The Analytics of Conflicting Considerations. There is more to the conflicting considerations model than the use of analogous policy arguments across legal issues. In highly schematic form, 31 I would define the model as follows: The considerations are not ideological, meaning that they are universal, or are considerations whose achievement or avoidance are of concern to all; The considerations conflict; 28 See id. at Between 1972 and 1975, I read Rudolf von Jhering s The Spirit of Roman Law [references are to the French edition, L ESPRIT DU DROIT ROMAIN DANS LES DIVERSES PHASES DE SON DÉVELOPPEMENT (0. de Meulenaere, trans., 2d ed. 1880) (1877) (French translation of German original)] because Fuller had cited it. Jhering s seemed to me a much better indeed an unutterably brilliant take on the issues Fuller discussed, and this greatly reduced my admiration for Fuller. My article downgrades him for this reason. See Kennedy, Form and Substance, supra note See KENNEDY, A CRITIQUE OF ADJUDICATION, supra note 2, at ch. 14 (discussing modernism and modern legal consciousness). 31 This description will be brief because I have tried this several times before. For a short summary, see id. at chs For a more elaborate version, see Duncan Kennedy, Freedom and Constraint in Adjudication: A Critical Phenomenology, 36 J. LEGAL EDUC. 518 (1986); Kennedy, A Semiotics of Legal Argument, supra note 2, at 75.

12 2000] FULLER S CONSIDERATION AND FORM 105 They have different force in different situations; Along a continuum of closely related typical fact situations, different considerations will be marginally stronger or weaker, as we move from the strongest case for one party to the strongest case for the other by marginally adjusting the details of conduct and setting. Possible legal solutions to any given legal problem are also arrayed on a continuum, ranging from those that most to those that least favor particularly situated parties for example, the tort rule covering a given situation can range from no duty through liability for malice only, to malice plus intent, then add gross negligence, then negligence, then switch the burden of proving negligence, then strict liability. When choosing a legal norm to cover a case, rational decision making selects from the continuum of normative possibilities the one that best accommodates (balances, maximizes, mini-maxes, or whatever) the conflicting considerations as they play out more or less strongly in the fact situation of which the case is an instance. The solution does not fully realize any consideration, nor does it ignore any that has force under the circumstances. The solution is responsive to the case, but only to the case seen as a specimen of a species of case, or situation-type. I would define conflicting considerations consciousness as that in which any norm can be looked at as the product of this kind of analysis, and assessed as such. Of course the actual reason why a norm was adopted may have nothing to do with an analysis of this kind. The norm could be the result of deduction from a more abstract norm, or it could be the result of an ideologically driven, that is socially partial, imposition by a power holder, or it could be an irrational or unprincipled compromise not reflecting the considerations that were really implicated. The crucial point is that it is possible to analyze any norm in this way that is, to go through the following steps. First, figure out the range of other norms that might be applied to the situation. Second, ask why this particular choice was made among the possibilities on the continuum. Third, identify this norm as a compromise between the ends of the spectrum reflecting the conflict among considerations pushing for more or less of this norm. Fourth, assess whether the compromise is sensible, or ask why it was made in the particular way it was. Nothing requires that one look at any particular norm this way. No one may ever have set out to look at a particular norm this way. But the idea is that you can do it if you want to, to every single norm. b.the Instability of the Model: The Ad Hoc, the Post Hoc, the Ideological, and the Possibility of Reconstruction. The conflicting considerations model has a kind of shadow, which is just as much a defining element as the formal arrangement of elements in the field. This is what I will call the shadow of ideology. It is present because participants in the discourse know that there is always a possibility that a given policy analysis will seem to be ad hoc in its definition of the situation to be dealt with,

13 106 COLUMBIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 100:94 and merely post hoc in its deployment of conflicting considerations reduced to easily manipulable argument-bites. The possibility that the discourse will devolve into indeterminacy leads to the threat that it will turn out that a given argument will be understood as no more than a cover or mask for an ideological intention ideological in the sense of partisan, or political, for example liberal or conservative. Legal argument in general is premised on the distinction between legal, that is, adjudicative discourse, and legislative, that is, political discourse. Against the possibility of descent through indeterminacy into the merely ideological, private law theorists combine traditional legal authorities and fancy normative discourses, such as economic efficiency or rights or democratic theory, to develop reconstruction projects. These purport to show that there is something more to legal analysis than the conflicting considerations model. They are various, and correspond to the schools of late-twentieth-century legal thought. The shadow of ideology is not a fact. It is the sense of unease, or of threat, or of crisis, or whatever, that motivates these reconstruction efforts. In characterizing the consciousness, the point is not that they fail so that the truth is the ineluctability of ideological contamination, nor is it to defend a particular reconstruction project or the possibility of such projects, nor some lower level idea like being merely pragmatic. The point is to convey the overall situation in which these are options and activities. c. Classical Legal Thought. For our purposes here, it isn t necessary to give an elaborate description of classical legal thought, or to enter into the interesting and still lively controversies about what it was if it was anything at all. It is enough to say that the private law theorists who developed the conflicting considerations model had a strong consensus about what they were reacting against and trying to replace. 32 There were two components to the earlier approach, one concerning legal reasoning and the other concerning the categorization of legal rules. What follows is a minimalist definition in each area. The classical equivalent of the conflicting considerations idea in modernist legal consciousness was the idea that, for any legal question, there was the possibility that, properly analyzed, the correct answer could be arrived at by applying basic principles that were both derived from and reflected in case law. It was not that all rules came from such an opera- 32 See Duncan Kennedy, Toward an Historical Understanding of Legal Consciousness: The Case of Classical Legal Thought in America, , in 3 RESEARCH IN L. & SOCIOLOGY 3, 4-5 (Steven Spitzer ed. 1980) (recounting the history of the Classical period); see also NEIL DUXBURY, PATTERNS OF AMERICAN JURISPRUDENCE 9-32 (1995) (referring to Classical legal thought as legal formalism); Horwitz, supra note 3, at chs. 1-2 (discussing the structures of classical legal thoughts); WILLIAM WIECEK, THE LOST WORLD OF CLASSICAL LEGAL THOUGHT (1998) (discussing history and ideology of legal classicism); Thomas C. Grey, Langdell s Orthodoxy, 45 U. PITT. L. REV. 1, (1983) (explaining the development of classical orthodoxy).

14 2000] FULLER S CONSIDERATION AND FORM 107 tion, or that one would think to try to analyze and assess all rules all the time that way. As with the conflicting considerations model, we can define classical legal thought by the possibility that an operation could be successfully performed. 33 Theories of law, say the idea that law is a science, or the idea that all legal questions are policy questions for the modem period, are both far too specific, coherent, explicit, and analytical, and, at the same time, too controversial, partial, partisan, and contested to characterize the consciousness of a period. 34 Classical legal thought should be associated not just with precedent and principle, but also with a particular ordering of substantive principles around the public-private distinction, iterated and reiterated at every level of doctrine. 35 A large part of the apparent experience they had of generating a sense of the necessity or correctness of their solutions to 33 Whether that would be a good or bad idea, a waste of time, or likely to be impossibly difficult given the historically idiosyncratic origins of the rules in force, there was still the possibility of doing a precedent-and-principle number, just as now there is always the possibility of doing a policy analysis. Attitudes toward the model were as various as those in our period toward the possibility of applying the conflicting considerations model as a universal element in any situation. The classics were as various in their actual practices as we are in ours. Sometimes they themselves operated according to the conflicting considerations model, as we will see in the particular case of the choice of legal form. See infra Part I. C. Sometimes they resolved questions by deduction as we sometimes, though less often, do today. Sometimes they acknowledged gaps, conflicts, or ambiguities confronting a person asked to identify and apply the law, and decided that no principled resolution was possible. Sometimes they appealed to policy, equity, history, philosophy, or economics rather than to legal logic. But they knew that it might very well happen, and that it would be an event to be welcomed, that an inquiry into the principles underlying the rules or the precedents might show that an apparent conflict between norms could be settled once a single principle underlying the apparently conflicting norms had been identified. In this system, it was common to acknowledge conflict among norms, conflict among jurisdictions (majority and minority rules), conflict about the nature of law, and uncertainty about what the right answer was. This is most decidedly not Grey s Langdellian Orthodoxy, supra note 32, at 1, or Horwitz s intrinsically conservatively-biased version of classical legal thought in The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy, supra note 3, at ch. 1. I am trying to identify an experience of legal reasoning during that period that would have been common to people across the whole spectrum of competing jurisprudential theories and also the whole spectrum of conflicting ideological orientations. In this version, what defined classicism was the possibility that difficulty might yield to precedent and principle, rather than anything like formalism. I am not talking about the legal theory anachronistic in any case because there was no such discipline back then or, less anachronistically, the jurisprudence or the philosophy of law of the period. Similarly, the conflicting considerations model does not represent the legal theory or the philosophy of law of the modern period. The consciousness idea is rather to get at presuppositions, unarticulated premises, or assumptions shared across the whole elite group. 34 The classical consciousness of the possibility of principle lurking in every situation was associated with, and in some complex way both the cause and the effect of, the experience that the legal elite had of reorganizing and re-analyzing the vast mass of rules imported from England or developed indigenously during the pre-civil War period. 35 See Grey, supra note 32, at (describing the classical public-private distinction and the literature s reliance on legal concepts to dictate judgments).

15 108 COLUMBIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 100:94 doctrinal problems may have derived from the fact that they were working out a new organization of rules that seemed to have many implications for the content of rules. For our purposes, what is most important about this ordering is this sequence: Public law is opposed to private law. Within private law, tort is opposed to contract, because tort is more public than contract tort is based on the will of the sovereign about how private parties should treat each other in the absence of agreement, while contract is based on the private parties own decisions about what rules should govern their interaction. Within contract law, quasi-contract, or restitution, is opposed to true contract because quasi-contract rules are imposed by the will of the sovereign concerning things like payments made by mistake, and are analogous to property rules (except that they deal with rights in personam rather than rights in rem), whereas true contract is about rules the parties make for themselves. Within true contract law, consideration doctrine is opposed to offer and acceptance, because the consideration requirement is imposed by the will of the sovereign on the parties, regardless of their wishes, say, to make an offer gratuitously irrevocable, whereas offer and acceptance is about finding the meeting of the minds of the parties. And so on indefinitely. A second substantive aspect of this system is that it tended toward putting the judge in the position of identifying an actor, public or private, who was in charge within a sphere, and then doing the will of that actor. In private law, there was the will of the parties, but also the will of the state limiting, for example, the possible types of property (e.g., through the rule against perpetuities) or outlawing particular types of contract, or defining the obligations of parties in the absence of agreement. In contract law, a dramatic example of the will of the sovereign as opposed to the will of the parties was consideration doctrine, which denied parties the power to make their promises legally enforceable, no matter how crystal clear had been their intent to achieve this result. In public law, there were the spheres of the separate judicial, legislative, and executive powers, then the spheres of state and federal actors. 36 C. Background of the Conflicting Considerations Model Some of the important predecessors of conflicting considerations thinking in law are, quite clearly, Jeremy Bentham, 37 Rudolf von Jhering See Kennedy, supra note 32, at 4-5 (describing these spheres and their legal relationships). 37 See e.g., JEREMY BENTHAM, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE PRINCIPLES OF MORALS AND LEGISLATION (J.H. Burns & H.L.A. Hart eds., Oxford Univ. Press 1970) (1789).

16 2000] FULLER S CONSIDERATION AND FORM 109 and Oliver Wendell Holmes. 39 The way they contributed will be for another time. For our purposes here, we need look at only one author in this genealogy, René Demogue, because his work was so important for the critique of the will theory, and for Fuller in particular, and is so little known today. 1. René Demogue.. René Demogue s 40 all but forgotten masterpiece, Les Notions fondamentales du droit privé: essai critique, 41 published in 1911 and partially translated into English soon thereafter as Analysis of Fundamental Notions, 42 initiated a particular type of legal theoretical project, which he describes in the first sentences of the preface: This book is not a study of positive law.... I have adopted mainly a critical point of view, in order to show, without seeking to disguise anything, the conflicts and contradictions which will no doubt always agitate private law, and my object will be attained if I may suggest to students already through with elementary studies reflections which will help them to penetrate the basis of institutions. 43 a. Demogue s Unstructured List of Reasons for Rules. His title is in itself a claim: that there is a limited set of basic ideas that animate the design of private law rules. They are static and dynamic security, economy of time and activity, justice, equality, liberty, solidarity and the principle of the spreading of losses, the notion of the general welfare or public 38 See, e.g., Jhering, supra note 29; RUDOLF VON JHERING, LAW AS A MEANS TO AN END (Isaac Husik trans., MacMillan 1924) (1877). Jhering was a German law professor, born 1818, died 1892, at once one of the greatest of legal historians, a philosopher of law, and a doctrinal writer who strongly influenced the development of German contract law and the drafting of the German Civil Code. He was widely read in France and in the United States, and is still recognized in Germany as one of the great figures of legal thought. Unfortunately, The Spirit of Roman Law has never been translated, while Law as a Means to an End, revolutionary in its time, is a good deal less interesting today. See Joseph Drake, Editorial Preface to this Volume xv, in JHERING, LAW AS A MEANS TO AN END, supra. 39 See, e.g., Oliver Wendell Holmes, Privilege, Malice, and Intent, in COLLECTED LEGAL PAPERS 117 (1920); Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Path of the Law, in COLLECTED LEGAL PAPERS 167 (1920); see also KENNEDY, A CRITIQUE OF ADJUDICATION, supra note 2, at 322; Thomas C. Grey, Holmes and Legal Pragmatism, 41 STAN. L. REV. 787, (1989). 40 Demogue was a French law professor, born 1872, died 1938, who taught at Lille, then at Paris, and is known for the book discussed at note 41, infra, and for his unfinished treatise on contract law, a sort of French equivalent of Corbin on Contracts. Like the other French theorists of the turn of the century who participated in the international critique of classical legal thought, Demogue is at present largely forgotten in French legal culture. See Christophe Jamin, Henri Capitant et René Demogue: Notation sur l actualité d un dialogue doctrinal (on file with the Columbia Law Review). 41 See RENE DEMOGUE, LES NOTIONS FONDAMENTALES DU DROIT PRIVE: ESSAI CRITIQUE (1911) [hereinafter DEMOGUE, NOTIONS]. 42 See René Demogue, Analysis of Fundamental Notions, in MODERN FRENCH LEGAL PHILOSOPHY 345 (Mrs. Franklin W. Scott & Joseph P. Chaimberlain trans., Macmillian 1916) (1911). 43 Id. at 349.

17 110 COLUMBIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 100:94 interest, protection of future as opposed to present interests, and protection of emotional as opposed to material interests. 44 Along with these bases, Demogue presents a catalogue of what he calls technical applications, meaning basic legal concepts such as freedom of contract. His book has some of the qualities of a Borges list. It includes what we would call policies, which we can see as goals that legal decision makers have or ought to have. But it also includes in a relatively unstructured list what we might call legal concepts, institutional descriptions, abstract values, concepts like evolution, and what we might call images or stereotypes about social life. But in the conclusion of the first part of the book the only part that was translated he clearly states his position about what it all means. I will let him speak for himself: The Tendency to Oversimplification: Fictions of Unity and Opposition. This rapid examination of the principal ideas that come into play in the theory of private law makes it now possible to express conclusions with greater force. The simplicity which our minds require does not appear to be the law of the exterior world. The simplist [sic] theories such as those of a world steadily advancing, of a world of infinite perfectibility, of solidarity and fraternity unfolding themselves ever more and more seem just as exaggerated as the duelistic [sic] theories, if I may be permitted to coin a word, which see everywhere in life a struggle between two opposite principles individualism and socialism, authority and liberty, progress and reaction, State and individual. Correct as approximations, as methods of instruction, these duels, if closely examined, are really battles between masses, certain parts of which support or oppose just as well one as the other of the two combatants. 45 A crucial point about Demogue is that at the time he wrote there had been a proliferation of French theorizing about how to conceptualize the coherence or not of the rules currently in force, about how to understand their history as in some sense the working out of scientific laws of social development, and about how to rationalize the reform of French law in the social direction. There was a well-established but still developing conception based on individual rights and the will theory, a theory of situational or variable natural law, associated with Gény (and Stammler), Duguit s notion of social law, the theory of solidarism, and Hauriou s institutionalism. 46 The striking accomplishment of Demogue is to present the notions simply as there in the legal consciousness of his time, 44 See id. at Id. at (footnotes omitted). 46 See MODERN FRENCH LEGAL PHILOSOPHY, supra note 42, at xxix xli (discussing these trends). On the general political theoretical context within which these legal developments occurred, see JACQUES DONZELOT, L INVENTION DU SOCIAL: ESSAI SUR LE DÉCLIN DES PASSIONS POLITIQUES (1984).

18 2000] FULLER S CONSIDERATION AND FORM 111 as what people actually think is important, without forcing them into his own meta-theory. After summarily critiquing the various modes of reconstruction of his time, and particularly the various metrics and evolutionisms, and pointing out that practice is contradictory when looked at in terms of any one value, 47 Demogue makes a characteristic conflicting considerations observation: In the opposition which ideas cause to arise at a given moment, the law of simplicity of the mind discloses a conflict bound to end in the death of the vanquished. This is an error. Each one of the sentiments is rooted in the needs of human nature, and the conquered one has right to its revenge. As slaves, in the times of the Saturnalia, got their few days compensation for the burden of a long obedience, so rejected ideas must retake, sooner or later, a part of the lost ground; whence comes that satisfaction, to a certain extent, of contradictory desires which is completed by illusion and hope. 48 In other words, there are no killer arguments. Instead, he proposes: Compromise, Not Logical Synthesis, the Goal of Juridical Effort. May we hope that the human brain will one day be strong enough to unite in one harmonious synthesis the elements on which law depends? I do not believe that it is possible. We can make fortunate reconciliations an effort which is even facilitated by the shut-in character of every society; but we must be conscious of their imperfection [L]aw can perfect its technic, that is to say its methods of perfectly attaining an end, or even several ends simultaneously. This is the only side on which it is certain that progress is possible. 49 b. Demogue on Static and Dynamic Security. Two of the many ways Demogue influenced the Americans who developed the conflicting considerations model were the following. He suggested a mere listing of notions or considerations as opposed to proposing a theory or undertaking a reconstruction project. Moreover, he developed a prototypical example of policy conflict in the area of the design of formalities the very topic that Fuller addressed, among others, in Consideration and Form. Demogue s contribution to the genealogy of formal considerations was the distinction between static and dynamic security. His position is that security is one of the most important of all the animating ideas of private law. He distinguishes between two types. Static security means that when you have rights, you know what they are, and expect to be able to defend them. Dynamic security, or security of transaction, means that See Demogue, supra note 42, at Id. at Id. at (footnotes omitted).

19 112 COLUMBIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 100:94 you know when you and your transactional partner will be bound, and to what. 50 Dynamic security is the goal behind devices like negotiability and the formal promise before a notary (in our case, the equivalent is the sealed promise). These devices encourage a person to enter into transactions because they assure him that it will be hard to take away the advantage he has secured by transacting, and hard to impose on him any more liability than he has deliberately incurred. If his partner puts him in the position of having to enforce his rights in court, the court will severely limit the defenses his partner can oppose to his claim. The goal, according to Demogue, is to encourage people to act productively. 51 Demogue posits a perennial and ineradicable conflict between the two types of security. Security of transaction is obtained by reducing the chance that a person will be able to defend himself against a claim by a person who has transacted for a right against him. The security of the holder in due course of a negotiable instrument is analytically as well as practically at the expense of the security of the maker, who loses the defense that he gave his note in a transaction in which it turned out that there was a failure of consideration. For stolen property, we must choose between the static security interest of the rightful owner and the dynamic security interest of the good-faith purchaser. 52 Demogue provided a complex complement to Rudolf von Jhering s discussion in his masterpiece, The Spirit of Roman Law. 53 Jhering dealt with what we now see as the quintessential formal question of rules against standards, and clearly distinguished formalities, i.e., rules about the manifestation of intent, from rules that do not have this function. His prototypical policy conflict was between the virtues and vices of rules (certainty for the parties, control of the judge but over- or under-inclusiveness), and the virtues and vices of standards (ethically exact, but uncertain and open to bias in judicial application). 54 Demogue points out that the question of whether you permit defenses against claims supported by formalities goes far beyond the problem Jhering identifies of people being bound when they didn t really want to be. In modern terms, his contrast of security of transaction and static security is on the border between form and substance. The cutting off of defenses vs. the equitable expansion of defenses can be done in a regime of rules or in a regime of standards. In other words, the two questions: (a) rule or standard and (b) lots of defenses or very few defenses, are logically independent of each other See id. at For a more complete discussion, see id. at See id. at 427. See id. at See supra note 29. See id. at 4, For elaboration, see Kennedy, Form and Substance, supra note 13, at

20 2000] FULLER S CONSIDERATION AND FORM 113 What makes Demogue a founder of conflicting considerations analysis is that he, like Jhering, identified a trade-off that is built into the lawmaking process. When one thing goes up (security of transaction), something else must go down (static security). This means that it never makes sense, when justifying a rule, to say that it is good because it promotes security of transaction. To make sense, one must add: at an acceptable cost to static security. Likewise for Jhering, it never makes sense to justify a rule by appeal to its administrability one must always add: and its acceptable cost in over- or underinclusiveness. This is the basic difference between the conflicting considerations model and the rival approach to policy analysis that identifies one policy per rule. 2. The State of Conflicting Considerations Thinking in Between 1900 and 1941, the notion that legal analysis had to be conflicting considerations analysis, or policy analysis, developed very rapidly. Historians of the legal thought of this period distinguish between the sociological jurisprudence of Roscoe Pound and legal realism. It is difficult to decide on the boundaries of these tendencies, and there are interesting conflicts in interpreting what the tenets of the schools were, and especially over what the realists really thought. 55 For our purposes, all of this is irrelevant. It is enough that by 1941, it was clear that a dramatic change had happened since 1900, and everyone seems to have agreed that the change was that policy was recognized as a crucial element in legal reasoning. Pound and Llewellyn had fought it out; 56 Felix Cohen had published Transcendental Nonsense and the Functional Approach 57 ; his father, Morris Cohen, 58 and Fuller 59 himself had developed a modified natural law response to the realist response to Pound. Llewellyn had written and circulated The Bramble Bush. 60 Everyone and his brother had offered an overview or totalization of the situation, starting from the idea that law is a means to an end and rejecting the idea, imputed to the nineteenth century, that deductive reasoning was or could be all, worrying about the consequences for certainty and judicial restraint of letting judges do policy analysis, and hoping or despairing for the future. It was not, however, clear just what form policy analysis would take. Because the technique was still new, no one had even tried to apply it across the full universe of legal questions. No one knew how it would 55 For a sampling, see Horwitz, supra note 3; LAURA KALMAN, LEGAL REALISM AT YALE, (1986); JOHN HENRY SCHLEGEL, AMERICAN LEGAL REALISM AND EMPIRICAL SOCIAL SCIENCE (1995); William W. Fisher III et. al., Introduction, in AMERICAN LEGAL REALISM xi, xiii (1993); Brian Leiter, Rethinking Legal Realism, 76 TEX. L. REV. 267 (1997); Joseph W. Singer, Legal Realism Now, 76 CAL. L. REV. 465 (1988). 56 See N. E. H. HULL, ROSCOE POUND AND KARL LLEWELLYN (1997) COLUM. L. REV. 809 (1935). 58 See Morris Cohen, On Absolutisms in Legal Thought, 84 U. PA. L. REV. 681 (1936). 59 See L. L. Fuller, American Legal Realism, 82 U. PA. L. REV. 429 (1934). 60 K. N. LLEWELYN, THE BRAMBLE BUSH (1951) (originally circulated in 1930 as materials for students).

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